Presentation: An urban planner on the run with Françoise Choay

Abstract

This text is the introduction by the Italian urbanist Alberto Magnaghi to the volume Del Destino della Città, an anthology of Choay's texts translated into Italian and published in 2008.

The anthology, edited by Magnaghi, includes eight texts from Pour une Anthropologie de l'Espace (2006). To these Magnaghi has added Choay's introduction to the Mémoires du Baron Haussmann, published in 2000. The three chapters are written from the perspective of a "militant architect urbanist", which leads him to articulate the reflections that permeate Choay's texts with the contemporary challenges faced by professionals in the field of urban planning, in direct dialogue with the principles dear to the Italian territorialist school.

Alberto Magnaghi is Professor Emeritus of Territorial Planning at the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence (DIDA), where he founded and directed the Laboratory for the Ecological Design of Settlements (LaPEI) between 1990 and 2016. He was the coordinator of a national research programme and experimental laboratories on self-sustainable local development and territorial identity representation (1986-2010), and also coordinated several urban projects and plans. She was also the director of the Master's Degree Course in Urban and Territorial Planning and Design at the Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Forestry Sciences and Technologies (DAGRI). He has been President of the Society of Territorialists since its inception.